A 66-year-old woman is pregnant in the UK

This is not something on which I feel I need to have an opinion, though I’m pretty happy with the decision I made to have a child early, when I still had boundless energy.

However, that’s me and my own limitations. My mother got pregnant with her fourth child after I, her third child, turned 14, and I was horrified. She was all of 36 or 37 — ancient, in my snot-nosed teenaged opinion, and not supposed to do much more than wait around and worry about when I was getting home.

12 responses to “A 66-year-old woman is pregnant in the UK”

Can a women become pregnant with IVF after menopause? I’m shocked that this is even possible!
I don’t know how a 70 year old woman will keep up with a 4 year old full time. It’s one thing to have the grandkids for the weekend, but another to be a parent every day for a toddler/preschool aged child. I can’t imagine it for myself at that age. Heck, I can’t imagine it at my age.
No way would I want to go through labor at this age. I might break something!

I dunno. My first reaction is similar to one in the article or the commentary: how soon before this kid is an orphan? Now, I realize that SOME people live to 100, and some, like my father, only make it to 48 — there are no guarantees that having kids at a specific age will protect them from parent-less-ness. But her chances of seeing the kid through college are pretty small.

I hope for the child’s sake that there is a BIG supportive circle around them.

I was never aware of any imperative to have children, so I don’t know what that’s like, but I kind of thought that it accompanied natural fertility cycles. No one’s asking me, but I’ll pose this anyway: wouldn’t it have been lovely to adopt a child already here and in need?

You know, that, too, seems to be inner-driven, the need to have a biological child. I just wanted a child and if it hadn’t happened the way I’d originally thought it would, I would have adopted, no problem.

Just musing now — we “know” that after a certain age, a woman’s chances of having a child with health-issues are pretty high (we’re now also hearing that the older the father, the more possible the health issues). It seems pretty unlikely that this her own eggs were used for the procedure — right? So if that’s the case, while she’s bearing a child, I’m only guessing that it isn’t her genetic child. So what about heredity in terms of health-history? It’s all just puzzling and interesting.

We were talking about this a few weeks ago in one of my classes. I, someone who was born when her parents were ages 40 and 42, said I thought it was selfish when older people have children. Another girl in the class, who was born to parents of “normal” age, jumped my case for saying that and wouldn’t shut up long enough for me to inform her, a.) I’m entitled to my opinion, so stfu, and b.) I know what the fuck I’m talking about because I lived it, tyvm. People can do what they want, but my own personal opinion is that it’s selfish, simply because I remember being five years old and being fully aware of how old I would be when my parents died, if they died at the “typical” age. Since I was born so late, all of my grandparents died before I was even a legal adult. One of my grandfathers would be about 105 if he were alive. I meet people who are 20 years older than me, and their parents are the same age as mine, or people my own age whose grandparents are my parents’ age. I’m twenty-three years old, and I’m flying back home this Saturday to take care of my parents because my dad is having surgery to remove his cancer and my mom can’t even dress herself anymore because she has degenerative disk disesase. I was nine years old when I started babysitting my grandma with Alzheimer’s to make sure she didn’t kill herself. And that girl in my class? Yeah, all she ever talks about doing with her family is watching football and drinking beer. I have most definitely lived a very different life than my chronological peers. I wouldn’t take it back, though. Since my parents were older, they didn’t obsess about some of the same superficial things younger adults did. One of my professors in college had this saying that I don’t fully remember, the gist of which was “when you’re twenty, you worry what other people think about you; when you’re forty, you don’t give a crap.” It’s very true, really, and it frustrates me when other people obsess about what everyone else thinks because I don’t understand why they do it. Anyway, this is way too long.

Wow. Damn. This is a pretty good argument that if you’re going to have children, have them early. That, as I’ve said, was my choice. I know others who had older parents who had a better time of it (no Alzheimer’s, etc.) because they had calmer parents. Not sure I was calm at all, but man, Molly. You don’t have to answer this — at all — but do you think you’d ever have a child or children?

My parents weren’t/aren’t horrid parents–old-fashioned, even for Arkansas, which sucks because I’m this wildly liberal lesbian that gets a great rush from protesting things . . . But compared to certain other parents I’ve met in my life, there have been many times I’ve been glad I had my parents instead of other people. My parents are far from perfect, but because so much tragedy surrounded my family, my parents recognize/d what’s important in life a lot of times, while a lot of younger parents were too busy obsessing about superficial crap. My parents were overprotective–I remember being ten years old and going on vacation (to Branson, naturally) and BOTH my parents holding my hand because Morgan Nick had been abducted about a month earlier. Statistically speaking, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, considering most people who are abducted are abducted by a family member or someone else close, not a stranger. At any rate, my parents meant well, and when they had me, it was because they wanted another baby. When people talk about how older people shouldn’t have children, or about how people shouldn’t have more than two children, I feel strange because if no one did, I wouldn’t exist.

As per your question, that’s something I’ve spent a lot of time considering. It’s not something to enter into lightly. I used to think I hated children, but then I realized that I didn’t hate children–I hated my childhood. If I did ever have a child, I think I’d just want one (Sylvia Ariel or Oscar Isaac, thank you very much), and I’d want to always make sure s/he was loved and happy and safe. That’s what’s really important, isn’t it?

As for all the stuff with my grandparents and now with my parents, my parents have no control over that, so it’s not fair to judge them about those things. I learned to be responsible at an early age and that’s not something I’ve ever regretted when I’ve looked at other people my age throughout the years and wanted to smack them.